Monday, May 06, 2013

Gloria and I have been watching the Voice of channel 9 and were particularly impressed by Imogen Brough's performance sin the blind audition and the Battle round.

However we were disappointed with the performance last night and suspect she won't make it through to following rounds.

NOTE I did not say were were disappoinited with HER performance last night. The disappointment was with the "Coaching" of Rick Martin. Why on earth did he send her out to sing in a key entirely outside of her comfortable range?

So far her demonstrated strength has been in the husky quality of her lower range, breaking out for a powerful climax as she did in the blind audition where all four "coaches" simultaneously turned their chairs in hope of claiming her for their teams.

For her performance last night she was required to sing in a high register continually moving into falsetto.

Poor coaching is almost certain to end her progress in that competition but hopefully will not damage her future in music.

Imogen Brough, you are a unique talent deserving to find success. I hope you find it.

Gloria and I are considering whether it is worth continuing with The Voice.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

I’ve just seen a comment on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph that suggested animal suffering will be alleviated with the adoption of a vegan diet.

I think the comment displays a noble but very naive desire.
The problem of animal suffering is more related to market forces and factory farming practices than by meat eating.

Humanely raised livestock, given an equally humane end to life results in far less suffering than many creatures experience “in the wild” as part of a natural foodchain.

A universal vegan diet would ultimately thrust those creatures currently raised domestically for food into “the wild”. It is unlikely that millions of these animals, no longer required for food, will be kept as pets or in zoos. What kind of habitat would be given over to them to allow them to roam in freedom and could they survive?

What suffering would they endure and for how long, until they slip to endangered status and eventually to probable extinction?

Veganism is NOT the answer to animal suffering, but being more selective with meat: eating less and choosing meat from animals raised and slaughtered humanely is a step in the right direction.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

I've been concentrating more on my new wordpress blog in recent weeks. At the moment that one is easier for me to access, even though it seems more difficult to use than this one. As I've said before something has changed. I can only access the dashboard of this blog and not the actual blog pages. As a result I can't even add comments or reply to comments.

Most of my posting to the blog is done via a work computer and either blogger have made some changes or the work IT system has been changed. Access to most blogs found on blogger has been blocked, the automated reason given is something called "placeholders". I don't have a clue what that means.

This also means that I can't view other blogs with a blogspot address, so unfortunately, if you have a blog on that system I can't access your blog either. I therefore haven't been able to read some of my favourite blogs for some time.

I'll keep this blog going and will make an occasional entry like this one, but unless the situation changes I'll be posting most things on wordpress from now on. This is the link to that blog:

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

It seems I'm not the only one to have my suspicions about Simon Crean.

This morning's Sunrise on channel seven were reporting that he was another potential challenger for the prime ministership, who could step in as an alternative to break the Gillard-Rudd tensions.

I told my family to keep an eye on Crean a couple of weeks ago after a reported snub of Julia Gillard when he failed to show up at a barbecue she had arranged to discuss matters with the party. This was straight after one of his early outbursts against Kevin Rudd.

Then a couple of days ago, after Crean had a series of media appearances blasting Rudd I wrote my previous post suggesting that we keep our eyes on him.

I think it would be unlikely for Crean to make a leadership move now. If he does make a move I think it will be after the next election (which Labor is almost guaranteed to lose). Then he will give himself a better opportunity to establish himself in leadership with the hope of winning the following election to become Prime Minister.